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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Balance

The trickiest part of a homeschool parent is finding balance, amidst a myriad of subjects and tasks to manage.These tasks, as homeschool parents, is like carrying a big load of laundry in your arms up the stairs. You grab a big handful of clothing, but articles casually spill over, under, and out of your arms as you take each step upward. There goes a sock. Next, your 4 year old's undies (of course there are undies in the livingroom. Do I really need to explain this?) And then a few more socks and a pair of pants. There's a t-shirt at the top of the stairs and a toy car falls out and hits your toe (why is that in the pile?). At first, you keep grabbing things and stuffing them back into your arms, but eventually you just keep trucking, get the mass into the washing machine, and vow to pick up the trail of articles later.

So too is our homeschool year. I've learned that a lot of little things will drop out along the way. In the past, I've moaned and fretted at each lost item. I caught up things as they fell, only to lose something else. Now, I think I've found a good (relatively decent) way of balancing things:

1. Aim high. If you don't shoot for the stars, you'll never reach them.

2. Celebrate what you *have* accomplished (and don't worry about all the little things that didn't happen).

3. If gaps or problems arise from the things that fell out of your grasp, you can go back later and make those the central focus. But until then, don't worry about them.

If you follow these steps, you should be celebrating more, right? And these successes should spur you onward! It's the focus on failures, or that we can never measure up that prevents us from doing great and amazing things. But if we tweak our perspective a bit, we can focus on all the things we can do, will do, have done, and suddenly, we're unstoppable.